5. Century City
Century city, the southwest corner of Beverly Hills, has a layout that you have to go for several times to avoid getting lost. The loneliness during my first quarter of college had eventually turned into a kind of savage materialism, which was actually quite compatible with the tone of this city.
On Friday afternoons and weekends the mall is always crowded. With my camera in hand I would deliberately make a menacing face in an attempt to cancel out any offense the lens might bring with such feigned malice.
“ I've always felt that there is a kind of glorious sadness hidden underneath the decadence of LA, especially in the hustle and bustle of the upscale malls, the colors and overexposure of the colliding downtown and the pink, purple and blue sunsets on the beaches -- there's always a kind of sorrow that's being absorbed and transformed and then embraced, over and over again, a kind of obliteration taken for granted.”
I wrote this paragraph during my first month in LA. Six months later the city seems to have learned to hide its disheveled ennui. Or perhaps ever since the very beginning, LA's sadness was just nothing but a drop of blue blurring out of the bottom of my eyes.
Digital. West Los Angeles. Winter 2023.
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